Red Rocks and Blonde Moments (many, many blonde moments)
- thewanderwomanrv
- Feb 14, 2022
- 8 min read
28 January – 4 February 2022
After we left Death Valley, we drove to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area just outside Las Vegas NV.
We stayed in Red Rock Campground just down the street from the park. It’s a pretty rustic campground without any hookups and only vault toilets (no sinks or showers) but it did have covered picnic tables and fire pits. There were water spigots outside the bathrooms for tent campers too.
Our campsite was pretty unlevel and when we deployed the auto levelers the driver side tires were off the ground! No Bueno! We ended up having to use my new Andersen levelers to raise one side of the trailer before redeploying the auto levelers.
More later on what NOT to do when using these (yes it was one of the blonde moments).
To do the scenic drive through Red Rock Canyon you must make a reservation online. There was nothing available the next day except at 4pm. It would be getting dark by then and we wouldn’t be able to hike. We found out at the gate that if you come before 8 am you can get in for free with no reservations.
The next day I woke up early, around 4 am and found the trailer batteries were dead. Grrrr! Not again! The whole time we were at Death Valley we didn’t have to run the generator at all and the batteries were fine. I didn’t understand why they were acting up now when the In Command system (the brains of the trailer) said they were at 13 volts when we went to bed. Once the sun came up, the power came back on as the solar panels started absorbing sunshine.
Since we seemed to have some electricity, we decided to go ahead and do the scenic drive and hikes.
The first hike was to Petroglyph Wall.
As the name implies it leads to a wall of petroglyphs and a few pictographs. Petroglyphs are pecked into the stone wall while pictographs are painted on. The paints are made from ground up minerals, clays or charcoal with a liquid binder such as plant juices, saliva or egg whites. No one knows what they say anymore but they’re still an important clue to the past.
The second hike was Lost Creek Trail. We saw so many different plants and trees and even a hummingbird!
The last hike we did was Pine Creek Canyon/Fire Ecology Trail. This was my favorite. It was so peaceful and the birds we saw were beautiful too. They were too quick to take pictures of so you'll just have to take my word for it.
We were going to go to an area outside the park called Calico Basin and do some hiking after lunch but when we got there, the road was closed off by the police. We thought maybe there had been a climbing accident but sadly it was even more tragic. We found out later that a mother took her baby’s life, then her own. A ranger found them in their car in the parking lot. I feel so bad for her and her family. A person has to feel pretty hopeless and be in an enormous amount of pain to do something like that. If you’re so inclined, please lift this family up in prayer.
Since our hiking was cut short, we decided to return to the campground. We built a campfire (my first one since I’ve been on the road!) and toasted marshmallows. Oh my gosh they were so good; I felt like a kid again. So how do you like your marshmallows? I’m impatient (shocking I know) so the first one I have to burn. I eat the outside, then re-toast the inside. Who’s with me on this?
After that, I can slow down and toast them to a golden brown. Denise, on the other hand is incredibly patient and slow roasts hers. Every. Time.
Later that evening when we went inside the trailer, It. Was. Dead. Like, completely dead. No lights, no water pump, no In Command system, nothing. Ugh! We got the generator out and ran it for a couple of hours trying to charge the batteries. When we turned it off, everything died again. (Remember this part for later in the story...it's probably my most embarrassing moment.) I was like okay, we need to get this looked at so we drove into town to get internet service and made reservations for the FAMCAMP at Nellis AFB in North Las Vegas. At least there we would have hookups and could get a mobile RV tech to come look at it.
After a very dark and cold night we broke camp and that’s when things really got hairy. Oh my gosh, talk about a comedy of errors! I’m so glad no one was filming us. First, we ran the generator so we could bring the slide in. My truck tailgate won’t go down all the way when hooked up to the trailer so we had to unplug the generator and load it in the truck at this point or we wouldn’t have been able to get it back in there. We still had to raise the auto levelers, so in order to provide electricity to the trailer I had to connect the truck to it. When backing up to do this, my foot slipped and I hit the gas instead of the brake and the hitch bumped the tongue of the trailer which knocked them off center of the blocks under it. Blonde moment number one. Blonde moment number two, DON’T REMOVE CHOCKS BEFORE HOOKING UP TRAILER! Remember the Andersen levelers? Well, this was the first time using them and we removed the chock (small triangle part) not thinking it would move because the site slopped down in front not back. When I went to extend the tongue jack so I could back the truck under it, the jack slipped partially off the blocks and the trailer started rolling backwards! With the auto levelers down! I had to stop the tongue jack before it slipped completely off the blocks and crashed to the ground and the auto levelers got bent. It was awful y’all. It was only 10am but by this time I needed a drink! And I don’t mean coffee. We finally got hooked up without further incidents and headed to Nellis.
Desert Eagle RV Park on Nellis AFB is really nice. The sites where we stayed were close together but our neighbors were very friendly and kind. It was $22/day for full hook ups which is hard to beat.
Nellis is the home of the Air Force Thunderbirds and we could see them practicing from our site. Pretty cool.
I’ve been wanting to visit the Neon Museum and Graveyard where they have the old neon signs from Las Vegas past. It’s best to go at night when they’re lit up so we ordered tickets and went. I wish I could share the pictures but they won’t let you post them to a business page, only your personal social media account. Sorry! It was really cool though! Here are a few of the signs that I can share.
I called Elite Mobile RV Service and Repair and left a message since it was Sunday and they were closed. They called back the next morning and came out pretty quickly. I explained everything that happened to Kameron, the owner, and he first went to check the batteries.
This is where we discovered blonde moment number three. I can’t believe I’m going to confess this because it’s so stupid and embarrassing but here goes…When we were at Red Rock Canyon and the batteries died the first night I tried doing some troubleshooting. I turned the battery kill switch on to check some things and also see if it would reboot the system. This disconnects power to the batteries. You wait a couple of minutes then you turn it back off to reconnect power. Can you guess what happened? Yep, I got distracted and forgot to turn the dang thing off to start power to the batteries again! That’s why we had absolutely no electricity the second night when we disconnected the generator!!
I'll pause here and wait for you to stop laughing...ya done yet?
We still didn’t understand why the batteries died in the middle of the first night when the In Command system said they were full. Kameron explained to me that you can’t go by what the In Command system says. You need a device called a smart shunt that shows the batteries’ state of charge.
This tells you how much power you have left in the batteries. My system was supposed to come with one, but Keystone neglected to install it (yes I will be having a conversation with Keystone). I’d never heard of a shunt and didn’t know I should’ve had one. He checked everything else out and all was good. So, blonde moment number four - I basically paid him $300 to tell me I had dead batteries! 🤯 Oh well, you don’t know, what you don’t know, until you know it. He was very understanding and I’m sure he got a good laugh out of it. I can laugh about it now, but it was really mortifying being so ignorant. We talked about my solar set up that I wanted to upgrade anyway and ended up hiring him to come back and do it. They came back on Friday and installed 2 more 200-watt solar panels, 2 more lithium batteries, an upgraded solar charger and the magical smart shunt. So now I have 800 watts of solar on the roof, 4-100Ah lithium batteries and I now know how to monitor it! He also knocked off the $300 for the initial call. Needless to say, I'm very pleased with their service.
So to recap; this is the In Command system display. It says I have 13.3V of battery power. That means absolutely nothing. Period. Ignore it.
This is part of the Smart Shunt app. It says I have 97% battery charge left. It is gospel. Period. All I need to know.
Since we had a few days to play before the solar install, we went to Hoover Dam. They aren’t doing tours right now due to Covid but we walked across it, watched a film on the history of it and visited the Exhibit Hall. We ended up spending 4 hours there even without the tour! It was amazing!
The dam is 726 ft high, 660 ft wide at the bottom and 1244 ft across at the top. It took about 5 years to build and is the only government project to ever come in under budget and finish early!
Power plant is the U shaped building. The other structures with the large holes are the valve houses. They are designed to bypass water around the dam under emergency or flood conditions.
Tuesday we drove over to Valley of Fire State Park. It's Nevada's first state park, founded in 1935. We found out about it from a guy we met at Red Rock Campground. Wow! We liked it better than Red Rock Canyon. It was chilly and really windy the day we went so we didn’t do a lot of hiking but we saw a lot of the park anyway.
Atlatl Rock has petroglyphs on it. How they got up there without a staircase to peck these petroglyphs I don't know.
Up next are the petrified logs. While the logs were buried, ground water, carrying minerals worked their way into the microscopic air spaces in the woody tissues where the minerals were deposited. Over time the minerals hardened and fossilizes the wood into stone. The colors are usually caused by iron oxides or manganese.
This is why they call it Valley of Fire. The rocks are so red it looks like they're on fire.
We had fun climbing in them. It was like being a little kid again (only not so easy to get up and down)
Right behind the visitor's center there was a covey of quail! We were stoked at another wildlife sighting.
Balancing Rock Gable had so much fun. He loves being outside with mom.
This is elephant rock. I thought it was pretty cool!
Now for the prettiest part of the park. This is near the fire wave which we didn't get to hike to because it was so cold and windy but I love the streaks in the rocks.
I don't even know what to say about these rocks formations and the colors. They're the most jaw dropping rocks I've ever seen.
So that's it for our time in Las Vegas! There were a lot of mistakes made and lessons learned. We've laughed so much about our mis-adventures. Although they're not fun when they happen, I think they make the best stories. Hopefully, they've entertained you and made you laugh too.
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